


Choice

by Shay_Nioum



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mute!Logan, analogical - Freeform, royality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-15 02:36:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16924935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shay_Nioum/pseuds/Shay_Nioum
Summary: Not having a voice is something that Logan was already well accustomed to, he’s gone all his life without speaking a single word. And really he’s fine living that kind of life, there have always been several ways to communicate outside of speaking. It is, however, the lack of choice in his life that hurts him the most.





	1. Chapter 1

Logan couldn’t recall a time before he wasn’t able to speak. 

He couldn’t remember if his voice had sounded too high or too low. The sound of himself singing to the various Disney songs that graced his TV was something completely unheard of to him. He couldn’t ever think of a moment where he had raised his hand in class to answer a teacher, and he couldn’t recollect a single moment where he’d played with the other children, making up fantastic worlds of fantasy and make-believe. He remembered everything else though.

He could remember the hushed whispers of the other children as he through the years, the careful and most certainly practical way that the teachers avoided calling on him for any kind of question. He knew the answers, and they all knew that he knew the answers. But that certainly didn’t stop anyone and everyone from talking over him. People barely stopped to breath when they knew that there was no chance of interrupting someone who couldn’t talk. 

His parents, his friends all throughout school, his teachers, and just about everyone that he met. There was no point in letting someone who couldn’t speak talk about what they knew. 

He hated every second of it.  

Life honestly felt kind of dull, just passing through the many different phases until he was able to settle on what that felt just right.

The smell of cigarette smoke had made his lungs and throat itch in a most grating way, like a live infestation of ants, had crawled into his chest was just burrowing inwards until there wasn’t a single part of his chest that didn’t feel that burning itchiness. It had left him coughing until he had tasted copper on his tongue, his poor lungs and vocal cords unable to handle it. So there was no chance that he was ever going to go back to that scene, at least not while his mother had anything to say about it. For four years he stuck with the neat and tidy polo shirt with clean crisply ironed pants. 

He looked intelligent, for all that it was worth. His thickly rimmed glasses, and his neat tucked in look with his slicked back hair left little to be desired about him.

Even if he didn’t have a single other thing going for him, he at least had this, he was smart. Smart enough to apply to a college near the end of his high school career and actually get it, all without studying. He qualified for a scholarship, quite a few in fact. Art, history, statistics, and so much more. He had a whole world of possibility out there before him.

He had choices, for the first time in his life he had a choice on where he could go and just what he could do in his life. 

He could be a teacher if he wanted to, teaching children just like himself. Or he could study art, and not only paint but go all over the world and discover new places and things. 

There was so much to be done in his life, and yet…

“Here’s your coffee Lo!” The bright beaming smile of the barista did little to lift Logan’s mood, as he set the warm steaming coffee down before him. It was a smile he was greeted with every time he came here, and it was a smile that Logan had come to reflexively return upon pure instinct alone. 

The barista was sweet, in his own way, the pile of curls that made up his hair made Logan think back to the countless nights as a child when he’d played with the bubbles in his bath. And his warm cocoa-colored eyes that just radiated warmth left him feeling like this job at a little coffee shop not even a couple of miles away from the college was not suited for the nice barista. He was soft, nice, and just...caring in the way that the world truly lacked. 

And...he was still standing there right next to him, even after he’d already set Logan’s coffee down. 

Glancing over to him, it took Logan a few seconds to notice just what had set him off. The barista, Patton his nametag read, clasped something tight in his hands all while continuously glancing over to another customer who’d squished himself in the darkest corner of the coffee shop. His posture was more hunched than anything, and the dark shadows that were cast on his face by his drawn hood left very little to be discovered about him. Aside from the fact that he seemed very interested in his cup of tea, as he tore his napkin to smaller and smaller pieces.  

Thrusting the items forward Patton flashed Logan a quick grin, as the nervousness bubbled up in his stomach. Even with the blank-eyed stare looking back at him, it was nothing in compared to his best friend’s scorching glare that he could feel searing a hole in the back of his uniform shirt. His bubbly work smile felt almost frozen to his face as Logan blinked slowly before gazing down at the two cookies in his hand and the number that was messily scrawled out on a tiny slip of paper. Just the handwriting alone told both Logan and Patton that Virgil had been shaking out of his mind when he had written it.

“My friend thinks that you’re cute!” Patton blurted out, as soon as Logan’s dark indigo eyes locked onto him with the fierceness of a chemistry teacher who had known that no one had studied, and that the entire class was already failing well before they had even walked into the room. Needless to say, it was a little nervewracking. “He uh..he wants to know if you can do a double date..with him and..with me and my boyfriend. Like a game night, you know charades?” Patton kept babbling and babbling as Logan’s eyes darted down to the slip of paper, again and again, he couldn’t quite place the look in Logan’s eyes and every passing moment that Logan said nothing left him feeling even worse than before. 

Then he saw the tears, and his heart exploded with the pain of a thousand burning knives. 

Logan’s breathing hitched for a moment, his lungs seized and his heart pounded in his chest to the point where it felt like a bird was trapped within his ribcage beating against it constantly in an effort to get out. His chest ached like never before, to the point where he almost thought that he was about to have another asthma attack. But no...it was just pain, a pain he was all too familiar with at this point.  

Was this some kind of joke to them? Was _he_ some kind of joke to them? Did they think that this was funny? Asking someone like him out, just to crush his feelings if he even had the gall to accept something like this? It was a trap, it had to be a trap. There was no way..there was no way on earth that someone as nice as the barista before him, and the man in the corner of the coffee shop wanted anything to do with him. Not like this…

Even his own parents hadn’t even…

Tears swam in his eyes, and the sight of Patton clenching the fabric of his apron blurred before him as the back of his eyes burned with the incoming onslaught of tears. His breathing caught in his chest as his fist tightened around the cookies once more, there was a cascade of crumbs and yet that infernal number still remained stubbornly in the center of his palm. The chair squealed as he hastily stood up, and the sight of a blurry blue blob told him that Patton had hastily stumbled back when he did. He already couldn’t see much, but he knew well enough where the door was as he made his escape. 

He’d be damned if he made an even bigger fool of himself, Patton and his mysterious little friend had already done enough of that. 


	2. Chapter 2

Honestly, the last thing that Virgil expected when watching from his tight corner of the coffee shop his heart pounding angrily in his chest, was for his crush to do was up and rush away as if a pack of hellhounds was on his heels about to devour him completely. The suddenness of it had made him jerk back completely as the shrill sound of the chair legs squealing against the floor left very little to the imagination.

 _This is it._ He sadly thought to himself in a maelstrom of inner loathing, although he wasn’t too surprised by it either. _You’ve completely run someone out of a coffee shop that they’ve come to for years, congratulations. You’re a terrible terrible person, and now anytime that he sees you he’s going to be so overcome by disgust that he-_

Blue eyes met deep almost bottomless black eyes, as Logan’s and Virgil’s eyes locked for a single second.

It was just a moment, but it was enough.

Something in Virgil’s heart trembled and squeezed at the sight of those eyes, such a deep bottomless blue that they could have held the entirety of the ocean in them. Even with the extensive distance between them, Virgil felt as he could see it all, the colors that were etched into Logan’s eyes would have been impossible to paint in a mural. It was impossible to find a way to recreate them so perfectly. They were just so.. So unfathomable, so dark, so beautiful, so entrancing, and...filling with tears by the second. The eyes of the ocean reflected layers upon layers of hurt, as they filled with even more water and spilling over in rivets down his cheeks.

Their eye contact was broken within seconds, and it didn’t take the guy that Virgil had been crushing on for weeks now to rush right out of those doors. Disappearing like a fallen leaf swept up in the winter wind.

“I’m sorry!” The words rushed out of Patton’s mouth in a flurry as soon as Virgil’s own chair scooted out from under him, yet another squealing sound resonating around the small little coffee shop. His hands were held up almost like a shield as if preparing him for Virgil’s oncoming wrath of spiteful hate-ridden words. Even though they both knew that was likely the last thing to ever come from Virgil, let alone towards Patton.

“What happened? What did you say to him?” He choked on every word, as his heart clenched, an icy cold dagger of fear and something else twisting horribly in his chest. “He..he..looked so sad…”

The look in Patton’s eyes said everything as he extended a hand out to his friend, attempting to rest it on his shoulder and steady him. The both of them were used to Virgil anxiety attacks that could come and go at just about anything, watching as Virgil sucked in a deep breath merely standing there rigidly as he clenched and unclenched his jaw. Patton didn’t know quite what to think, of course, he’d known about Virgil’s crush, but that was all he had assumed it to be at this point. And yet...watching every possible muscle inside of Virgil that was so tensed up that it looked almost like he was being threatened at gunpoint simultaneously go lax as the man before him hissed out a long breath. It left him frozen in stunned silence, as an accumulation of unreadable emotions passed over Virgil’s face from the very second he straightened up, his back as straight as an arrow.

“I’ll be right back.”

 

The winds of early winter nipped at Logan’s cheeks as he tried to put as much distance as he could between him and that damned coffee shop, of course, the tears that came and just kept coming certainly weren’t that big of a help to him. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Logan wished that he could scream, that he could wail and just let his sorrow be known to anyone listening. He wished that anyone cared enough to listen to him, to what he wanted. Nobody wanted to hear the words of someone who couldn’t speak, nobody cared enough to.

Then again, he’d already come to terms with long ago that most likely he’d never find someone for him. It was what had made it easier to focus on work, and nothing but work.

In the end though, there he was, pathetically sitting on a bus stop bench with the chill of snow already seeping into his bones, leaving him shivering and shaking. Of course, he had to pick today of all days, the day that it finally snowed in Florida to come and have a cup of coffee, and have an emotional breakdown in public. And yet even knowing this, Logan couldn’t stop crying, the soundless sobs that left his lips only made his throat itch all the more as he sat there, hunched over as the snow slowly drifted down around him, his lungs burned, and even so he couldn’t stop. It felt like it would never stop for him, like the tears were from an endless fountain that would never run out of water.

 _Why can’t I stop?_ Logan angrily thought to himself as he roughly swiped away at the streams of tears away with the sleeve of his sweater.

The only plus side he was even certain that he could think of at that moment, was that he was certain he’d never see that barista or his friend ever again, it wasn’t like he was just suddenly going to-

“Hey! Hey, wait!”

Speak of the devil.

The desperate and very nearly out of breath voice broke through Logan’s train of thought as his eyes snapped up, it was the man with the black obsidian eyes running towards him with a look of sheer desperation written all over his face. His cheeks were dusted in red, as he huffed and puffed.

It was now though, now that the guy was huddled up in the corner of the coffee shop that Logan was able to get a better look at him. He was tall and lanky, so much more taller than himself now that he was able to properly look at him, and his hair looked like spun strands of black and purple thread on a doll that blew in the frigid wind. Just about everything about him looked dark and spooky, like Halloween personified if his eyeshadow covered face and patchwork jacket was anything to go by. And even with that...Logan couldn’t help to notice a strange gentleness about him, as his long fingers fiddled with a loose thread on his sleeve, and his gaze darting everywhere but Logan’s face.

“I uh…” Gathering his breath, Virgil could feel the rush of heat swimming over his face as he stood face to face with the guy he’d had a crush on. Never had he thought that he had been able to do this, and yet here he was. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” He blurted out, the words a mixture of hot and cold on his tongue. “It was never my intention to make you upset, I don’t know exactly what my friend said but...I..I…” A long exhale escaped from Virgil’s mouth as he hunched his shoulders instinctively, not a single sound had come from his crush and he couldn’t help but to fear the worst. Especially as his gaze slowly drifted up from Logan’s cozy looking winter boots, to his face. “I like you..” He softly confessed, “We uh..we’re in the same art class, you most likely didn’t notice me. Since I tend to be in the back and all, but...you don’t have to go on a date with me, you don’t even have to keep my number. I just...wanted to tell you.”

There was silence, silence and the feeling of Virgil’s heart slowly freezing over and cracking open with each passing second.

He’d been an idiot. A foolish foolish idiot to think that someone like Logan would like him, if anything he probably thought that he was creepy. After all, who watches someone in class? He was weird, even Logan could see that. And-

“ _Stop._ ” The harsh movement of Logan’s hand meeting his palm, cut through the air like an ax to a cutting block as he signed the single word that would tell so much more than his non-existent words ever could. With that single word, an entire world of understanding dawned on Virgil’s face as his mouth snapped shut like a mousetrap seizing its prey. His eyes darted all over Logan’s face, as if looking for a single hint or something as those dark bottomless eyes sank back down to Logan’s hands.

He finally seemed to understand, and now that he understood…

Logan swallowed thickly, reining in the tears that he had long since shed already as his eyes darted down to the snow-laden ground. Virgil would leave now, regardless of how kind he seemed, it never took long for them to leave once they understood. He’d leave, and once again Logan would be content to live out his life alone, completely and utterly alone once again. His lungs ached as he held his breath, waiting for the tell-tale sound, the noise that would echo within his mind for years to follow. The sound of Virgil’s footsteps leading him away from where Logan sat among the snow, frigid and freezing. He had experienced so much noise in his life, and yet...in this one moment when he expected nothing but noise, there was the one thing that he knew best.

Silence.

Peering up at the man who had dashed through the snow to apologize to him, Logan wanted to weep, he wanted to fall to his knees and ask whatever god there was, just what he had done to deserve this. As Virgil slowly stooped down to his knees, and warmth encased his hands as the man gingerly opened Logan’s hands. Every movement slow and predictable, stoppable even if he so chose to have it. The moment that Virgil’s fingers connected with his palm, brushing against them really, Logan too understood.

“ _I’m listening._ ” Virgil, this sweet, dark, spooky man spelled out each word onto his palm, the trail of words leaving behind a sensation akin to a fire blazing in and out of glory right in the palms of his hands.

He was listening, he was being listened to.


End file.
